The publisher is a program that that works with a MIM server to track changes that have been made to MIM databases. The publisher will publish these changes to multiple subscribers. The subscribers are the parties that are interested in receiving all or some of the changes that have been applied to the databases hosted by the MIM server. The publisher runs on the same hardware as the MIM server. Updates are applied to a MIM server periodically throughout the day by the load_updates.sh script. Once load_updates.sh has applied the updates to the MIM server, it starts the publisher. The publisher reads in the subscriber configuration files, and then makes an API call to fetch the change log from the server. The changes are then published to the appropriate subscribers.

The publisher only works with MIM servers that receive updates. Any MIM servers that are strictly used for reading will not work with the publisher.